We are delighted to announce the general availability of oVirt 4.2, as of December 19, 2017, for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4, CentOS Linux 7.4, or similar.

oVirt 4.2 is an altogether more powerful and flexible open source virtualization solution. The release is a major milestone for the project, encompassing over 1000 individual changes and a wide range of enhancements spanning storage, network, engine, user interface, and analytics.

What’s new in oVirt 4.2?

The big new features:

The Administration Portal has been redesigned using Patternfly, a widely adopted standard in web application design that promotes consistency and usability across IT applications. The result is a more intuitive and user-friendly user interface, featuring improved performance. Here is a screenshot of the Administration Portal dashboard:

A new VM Portal for non-admin users. Built with performance and ease of use in mind, the new VM portal delivers a more streamlined experience.

A High Performance VM type has been added to the existing “Server” and “Desktop” types. The new type enables administrators to easily optimize a VM for high performance workloads.

The oVirt Metrics Store is a real-time monitoring solution, providing complete infrastructure visibility for decision making and faster issue resolution, based on metrics and logs.

oVirt now supports VM connectivity via software defined networks (SDN) – implemented by Open Virtual Network (OVN). OVN is automatically deployed to hypervisors, and made available for VM connectivity. Networks can be defined in the UI, over REST, or within the ManageIQ Gaprindashvili release (now in RC).

Other cool enhancements:

Support for Nvidia vGPU, a technology that enables users to shard a GRID-capable physical GPU into several smaller instances, for GPU-accelerated workloads.

The ovirt-ansible-roles set of packages helps users with common administration tasks. All roles can be executed from the command line using Ansible, and some are executed directly from oVirt engine.

oVirt will now use PostgresSQL 9.5 as its database, for improved performance.

Support for LLDP, enabling oVirt hosts to gather information from their networking interfaces, for improved network configuration. The information can be displayed both in the UI and via an API.

Snapshots can be uploaded and downloaded via the REST API and the SDKs.

A new self-hosted engine wizard UI. Among other improvements it now enables users to review and edit their inputs before beginning the deployment process.

Hosted Engine Ansible Based Deployment(in Beta), using “ovirt-hosted-engine-setup –ansible”, is a new method to deploy a hosted engine. It reduces deployment issues, and will enable users to benefit from future features such as single storage for the hosted engine and other VMs, live storage migration, and improved hosted engine VM editing capabilities. We expect it to become the default provisioning flow for Hosted Engine and would be glad to get feedback on its functionality!

The ipa-client package is now installed on hosts and included in the oVirt Node. This identity management feature provides users with a seamless experience while moving between Cockpit and other products.

Virt-v2v now supports Debian/Ubuntu based VMs, in addition to EL and Windows-based VMs.

Restored support for Gluster ISO domains.

Improved Affinity Label management tools were incorporated into the cluster, host, and VM’s edit dialogs.

Also in oVirt 4.2:

oVirt now features Gluster 3.12.

oVirt’s hyperconverged solution now enables a single replica Gluster deployment.

Improved self-hosted-engine iSCSI deployment.

A new driver for Win10, for seamless remote access to VMs, and improved performance.

Administrators can now use the Administration Portal to remove a LUN from the storage domain.

Instead of polling libvirt every 2 seconds to get the used disk for each thin disk, VDSM now uses events, for a noticeable increase in efficiency on a host with tens or hundreds of VMs.

In addition, there are stability and performance improvements in live storage migration and live merge.

For more information on oVirt 4.2.0, see the latest release notes.